John Dowdell works at Adobe in San Francisco, reading customer commentary all day. Views are my own; content is stuff that I think other people might find useful.

Unpublished comments

I’m reposting some comments here which, for whatever reasons, never made it into the original weblogs. Mike Krisher had difficulty updating Creative Suite; “Hey I’m Ben” had a Linux-aggrieved-by-Adobe rant with many supportive comments published; Chris Nicol had a post on Silverlight economics.

——————————–http://www.mikekrisher.com/?p=501Hi Mike, sorry I’ve been so overwhelmed on MXNA recently and didn’tcatch this earlier…. :(The symptom “cannot apply update” can occur to multiple CS3 products,usually due to files being changed on disc and no longer beingrecognizable for an update.http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402323But you say you already reinstalled the app, to get it back to a knowncondition, hmm….Up on the Labs site there’s mention of the same symptom, but it soundslike it has a sequencing cause… does this citation help any?http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Flash_CS3_Professional_Updatejd/adobe—————————————————————-http://www.arsgeek.com/2008/09/04/linux-and-flash-cut-the-crap-already/Hi, you’re probably hurting your own cause here… you’re abetting theargument that Linux fans are not possible to satisfy. It’s your call tomake, but rants do impose a cost on the reputation of the speaker.If you can get your failing-video config info into the bugbase, thenothers can try to isolate the difference:https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/For 64-bit work, you’re welcome to attempt to contribute to the Tamarinproject, but the learning curve is high.WMODE is starting to be supported in Linux browsers (that “popup underthe SWF” situation). Not all are standardized yet though; more:http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/releasenotes.htmlIf you’d like to do something for BSD, then Open Screen Project may be avenue able to help:http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/”Wouldn’t it be better to go directly to the bottom of the problem andinstead of demanding a player that request the format to be opened?”Your use of “open” is underdefined, but the format itself has beenopenly published for free-of-cost use for a good decade now:http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/http://news.cnet.com/Macromedia-to-open-Flash/2100-1001_3-210131.html(Governance of the SWF file format still resides within Adobe. PDFgovernance is now under ISO. But ECMA and W3C don’t make much progress.Successful governance is still an open issue.)Yes, Adobe does sell authoring tools. No, you do not need to pay Adobeor anyone else any money to create SWF and use the omnipresent AdobeFlash Player:http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexdownloads/index.htmlhttp://osflash.org/Inside Adobe, most people think Linux fans are natural allies, but canbe difficult to deal with. I’d like to see more computational abilitiesavailable, whatever the OS, whatever the device form-factor.jd/adobe—————————————————————-http://www.philterdesign.com/blog/2008/09/silverlight_vs_flash.html“… if you have a bunch of .NET Developers and a client that wantsa RIA then it’s really a no brainer, Silverlight is for you.”I’d agree with that, if the client is willing to pass the installationcosts along to the audience and take the probable drop-off in viewingrate. (It’s not just developers… audience needs are important too.)jd/adobe——————————–